‘Don, it’ll be all right,’ Polly whispered as they made their way home. ‘Me guardian angel was in church so she was, and she smiled at me, gentle and beautiful. She’s goin’ to take care of our daddy, I know she is.’
And Donal, who had laughed before today and codded her about her guardian angel, looked down at her and smiled and squeezed her hand.
‘I’m sure she will,’ he said, keeping his voice low as Polly had done. ‘I’m sure she will, alanna. For a train’s a turble big t’ing to be hit by. Our daddy will want all the help he can get to make him better so he will.’
Deirdre sat by the bed. Peader had tubes leading out of here and into there. He had so many cuts and abrasions on his face that she’d not recognised him at first . . . ah dear, and he so beautiful! But the spark of life still flickered, though he lay, eyes closed, face stern, far from them.
The nurse who was looking after him told Deirdre that he was a very strong man, strong as an ox, with a strong heart and good lungs.
‘He’ll need that strength in the weeks to come,’ she had said, and Deirdre had smiled like an idiot. ‘Weeks to come’ meant he wasn’t going to die in five minutes, which was how he looked with his grey skin and his mouth half open and his eyes sunk back into his head. ‘You pray for him, Mrs O’Brady, and spend as much time as you can with him whilst his wounds heal. Who knows? He may walk out of here yet.’
That plunged Deirdre into depression again, because that made it sound as though it would need a miracle to get Peader on his feet again. But all you could do was pray and stay, pray and stay, and perhaps one day Peader would open an eye, smile, speak.
His injuries are terrible,’ the doctor had said when Deirdre had first arrived. ‘It’s a miracle he’s here at all, Mrs O’Brady. But with every day that passes wounds heal a little bit and blood strengthens, bone knits. If we can just keep him alive . . .’
‘Home each night at six, Mammy,’ Brogan told her, and though she had tried to insist that she must stay with Peader, she saw the sense of it in the end. Besides, the nurses made it plain they didn’t want her all night as well as all day.
‘We can do wit’out you as a patient, too, Mrs O’Brady,’ Sister Lucy Flanaghan told her roundly. Lucy, being a Dublin girl herself, spoke out as one Irishwoman to another. ‘’Tis ill you’ll make yourself, my dear.’
So Deirdre took herself off home each night to the small house in Salop Street, and slept in the bed where her Peader had slumbered for the past dozen or so years. And if his pillow was wet with her tears by midnight, sure and didn’t she keep her unhappiness to herself when she went on to the ward? Cheerful she was then and optimistic, holding his poor hand, with the stitches marching across it like a railway line and stroking his cheek and telling him to get well soon, please, for hadn’t she come a hell of a long way to see him, and wasn’t it a poor thing that she was forced to sit by his bed and talk to herself, now?
But Peader never stirred, never moved a muscle or made so much as the tiniest sound. Nurses came in and made his poor, stiff limbs exercise, they wagged his arms and legs and turned him over, and Deirdre winced at the great, livid scars all over him and wondered, sometimes, whether he would ever be well. But then she would chide herself for her lack of faith and thank God he was still alive and on her way home would rush into the nearest church, which happened to be St Athanasius’, on Chancel Street. There she would light a candle, genuflect, and then pray hard until her knees ached and her chaotic and painful thoughts gradually eased and smoothed out. Only then would she make her way back to Mrs Burt and the meal which awaited her.
‘How shall I pay her?’ she had asked Brogan just before he left for Crewe. A good job had to be nurtured at a time of high unemployment and Brogan dared stay away no longer. Martin, having delivered her and seen his father, had caught the next boat back to Ireland and the rest of the family. ‘I’ve no money, son.’
‘I’m paying; don’t worry about it,’ Brogan muttered. ‘I’ll leave you some money, Mammy, and send you more each week.’
Standing on the station platform, they had looked at each other, each knowing the worry that nagged them.
How long? How long would Peader lie there and how long could Deirdre stay? It was all very well to say she’d stay for ever, but the only money coming in back in Dublin was Martin’s with Donal’s part-time work and any pennies Polly could earn. Soon rent would be due, food would run short, school fees would be demanded for the coming term. Brogan sent what he could but he was supporting Deirdre and himself as well as the family, now. He could do no more.
‘We’ll manage, Mammy,’ Brogan said quietly at last. ‘If the worst comes to the worst sure an’ aren’t there the St Vincent de Paul men, or the Assistance? The kids will not starve.’
‘They’d starve sooner than call in the Vincent’s men,’ Deirdre said. ‘They humiliate you, Brogan, tell you that others manage on less. Your daddy saved us from all that. Oh, dear God, let him get well!’
‘The Ward Sister’s hopeful,’ Brogan said. ‘Mammy, here’s me train, I can’t stop. But I’ll be back to see the pair of youse as soon as I’ve a day or so off. Ring the booking office at Crewe station if there’s any change. They’ll see I get the message.’
‘I will,’ Deirdre promised. ‘And I’ll write you each week, son, when I write to Polly and the boys.’
She waved the train off, and then returned to the Stanley, and her man.
‘It’s goin’ to be a funny old Christmas so it is,’ Polly grumbled to Tad as the two of them made their way through the Francis Street market one Saturday afternoon in early December. ‘No daddy, no mammy, and no presents, either. And precious little dinner, Martin says.’
‘I’ll give you half what I make if you help me wit’ the papers,’ Tad said, but without much enthusiasm. ‘We can’t pick spuds because the ground’s froze hard, but I suppose we could go for cabbage. They cut cabbage, don’t they? You don’t have to dig or nothin’.’
‘Tell you what; we could get holly and mistletoe and hawk it round the big houses, the rich houses,’ Polly said suddenly. ‘I know most of ’em have it growin’ in their gardens, but they buy it usually. Why don’t we do that?’
She was sick and tired of keeping house, to tell the truth. Sick and tired! She had never realised how hard mammies worked, and finding out had put her right off marriage, and that was the truth so it was.
She just never stopped and the boys, who had been good with Mammy, weren’t good with her at all. They would peel spuds at a pinch, and they brought water up and emptied the slop buckets and that was it. Everything else was Polly’s job, Polly’s responsibility, and she was getting heartily sick of it. And then, yesterday, Martin had started talking about Christmas dinner . . . sprouts, a bird, a pudding . . . and Polly had told them straight.
‘I can’t cook things like that,’ she had wailed. ‘And I won’t. You’re a bunch of lazy moochers and if you don’t help me more you’ll go hungry so you will, because I won’t cook so much as a spud for youse!’
‘Temper, temper,’ Martin said. ‘Brogan told us to pull together, Polly, and he told you to mind me. Remember?’
Polly did remember, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.
‘Don’t care; shan’t cook,’ she had said succinctly. ‘Nor I shan’t light the fires, ’cos that last lot of turf you brought in was drippin’ wet – soaked, it were. It’s someone else’s turn, and it’ll be someone else’s turn on Christmas Day, an’ all.’
‘We’re workin’ hard,’ Donal said in an injured voice. ‘You aren’t even at school, Polly.’
Polly had volunteered to give up school until her mother returned and this, she had soon realised, was a tactical error of giant proportions. How often had she got out of an unpopular task with a cry of ‘I’ve got to do me eckers!’ But now such pretence was useless. Kids who aren’t at school don’t get homework, they have to listen to the excuses of others, knowing them to be excuses but powerless to do anything about it.
But now, Tad and Polly had drawn level with a fish stall, or rather with a basket-car full of fish. It smelt, but Tad pulled Polly to a halt.
‘Holly an’ mistletoe for Christmas! Sure an’ the girl’s a genius, so she is! Phoenix Park!’
‘I thought we might go to the country,’ Polly said uncertainly. ‘We can catch a tram for quite a way, then we can walk.’
‘Sure we could, but the big houses in Phoenix Park, they like holly hedges. It keeps the chisellers out, d’you see? So why not get some little, berried bits today, an’ go out after mistletoe after Mass tomorrow? We could sell it for six bunches a penny . . . something like that. ’Tis all profit, after all.’
‘All right, I’d do anythin’ rather than housework,’ Polly agreed rather bitterly. She had left the beds unmade, the porridge pan unscraped, the clothes unwashed, and she intended to keep it that way.
‘Other girls raise
families
when their mammies are workin’,’ Martin had pointed out when she moaned at him that she was nothin’ but a slave. ‘Kids of seven do all the messages, bring up the babies, cook the food . . .’
‘’Tis a liar you are, Martin O’Brady!’ Polly had yelled. ‘I’m nine and I can’t do all that. As for Ivan, sure and he’s not a baby at all, he’s a
fiend
so he is!’
The fiend, sitting on the hearthrug with a piece of paper and some stumps of pencil, looked up and grinned. He knew Polly hated him right now but he didn’t much care. He got up when he felt like it and went out to play with his friends, bowling hoops down Thomas Street, chasing cats, cheeking shopkeepers. It was great sport and his mammy would never have allowed it, but Polly was just pleased to get him out of her hair now and then and seldom bothered to ask where he had been. And she fed him, so that was all right.
‘So you’re on, then?’ Tad chuckled and rubbed his hands. ‘We’ll be rich by the time Christmas comes!’
‘Rich and scratched to ribbons,’ Polly moaned two hours later, as they wheeled their borrowed perambulator across the dusky meadows of Phoenix Park. But though her arms and hands smarted, she felt rather pleased with herself. The two of them had gone round the back of the President’s house, the most important man in all Ireland, and they had hacked away with the breadknife at the holly bushes there and chucked their prickly spoil in the pram and now they were wheeling it home.
‘We ought to see if the President would like to buy some to make a Christmas wreath for his door,’ Tad whispered, and Polly had giggled, though she was secretly rather shocked. Fancy stealing holly off an important man and then selling it back to him!
But in fact, by the time their pram bulged with holly, they were too tired and it was too late for selling anything.
‘Tomorrer we’ll do the countryside an’ get mistletoe,’ Tad said, pushing beside her. ‘After Mass, mind. I don’t aim to imperil me immortal soul just for a few pennies.’
‘Your immortal soul’s in poor shape anyway, ’cos stealin’ holly’s a sin,’ Polly said. She did feel rather ashamed of herself. Boxing the fox was one thing, that wasn’t stealing exactly, even the police didn’t call that stealing. But taking the presidential holly . . . well, that wasn’t quite so straightforward.
‘You can’t steal holly,’ Tad said impatiently, shoving away at the pram much harder than Polly was, so that they waltzed right across the sandy path and into the grass verge. ‘Have a care where you’re pushin’, girl! No, you can’t steal holly, because it’s a wild tree, a woodland tree. You’ve sung
The Holly and the Ivy
, haven’t you?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Polly asked. Her back was aching and her scratches burned like fire. Hell fire, she thought apprehensively. Oh, God love me, I didn’t mean no harm, honest!
‘Well, the holly and the ivy are Christmas things, and they grow wild in the woods. So you can’t steal ’em. Nor mistletoe,’ Tad said instructively. ‘I swear to God, Poll, that I wouldn’t lead you into stealin’, because I promised Martin to see you was all right. And it’s fine holly, wouldn’t you say? It’s got a
grush
of berries. Have you seen the holly in the market? Not a berry, most of it. Oh aye, ours is good holly, we’ll see our money back on that lot.’
‘We didn’t put any money out for it,’ Polly said crossly. ‘Oh, Tad, and when I get home there’ll be no fire, no supper cooked, no washin’ done. Oh, I want me mammy back mortal bad!’
Sara had met Peader in the Queen’s Arms, so naturally, the next time she was collecting in the pub, she expected to see him, sitting in his corner seat with his friends around him. But he wasn’t there. She was collecting of course, handing out the
War Cry
and rattling her tin to raise money for the Army’s various charitable ventures, which meant that she could scarcely pop in next day to check that Peader hadn’t merely been absent from his usual corner for the one night.
But a couple of weeks later she was in again and little Freddy Mack was there.
‘I wonder, you’re Irish, aren’t you?’ Sara said, having listened to his brogue for a few minutes. ‘Do you know a fellow-countryman of yours called Peader O’Brady? I’m by way of being a – a friend of his son’s, Brogan O’Brady, and I’m rather keen to get in touch.’
The small man looked at her pityingly.
‘Peader O’Brady was hit by an express train, when he was laying detonators in fog,’ he said. ‘There’s sorry I am, Miss, to be the one to tell you.’